Plans to “draw down” CO2 from the atmosphere – known as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) – “fall short” of the quantities needed to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, new research warns.
Keeping global temperatures below the limit set in the 2015 Paris Agreement requires rapid cuts in greenhouse emissions.
However, scenarios consistent with the Paris limit also assume heavy reliance on CDR, particularly in the second half of the 21st century.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, quantifies the “CDR gap” – the difference between the amount of CDR included in national climate plans and what would be needed to limit warming to 1.5C.
CDR currently removes about 3bn tonnes of CO2 from the air every year, of which almost 100% comes from land-based methods, such as afforestation and reforestation, the study says.
The authors estimate that if countries implement their national targets, CDR will increase by up to 1.9bn tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050.
However, assessing a range of scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5C, the authors find a “CDR gap” in 2050 of 0.4bn-5.5bn tonnes of CDR per year.
One scientist, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that framing the lack of additional plans for CDR as a “gap” is an “interesting idea”. However, he says it may not reflect a “definitive need for action” because the future role of CDR is debated.
Some scientists argue that reliance on CDR should be avoided, because land-based CDR can cause significant ecological and societal risks. Others worry that the promise of being able to use CDR in the future might dilute incentives to cut fossil-fuel use today.
The lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that he recognises these concerns and made an effort to discuss them in the paper.
However, he says that calculating the CDR gap is important for assessing nations’ progress – and will provide a way of knowing whether countries are under- or over-committing to CDR in the future.
CO2 removal
CO2 removal (CDR) refers to methods that draw down CO2 from the air and store it indefinitely on land, in the ocean, in geological formations or in products.
The study authors note that the term CDR “includes human enhancement of natural removal processes, but excludes natural uptake not caused directly by human activities”. The latter includes the huge amounts of CO2 absorbed by the land and oceans each year.
The paper groups CDR into two categories:
- Conventional CDR on land: This includes afforestation, in which trees are planted when previously there were none, and reforestation, which means restoring areas where the trees have been cut down or degraded.
- Novel CDR: This includes all CDR methods that are not based on forestry and land-use change, such as biochar, direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
Using data collected over 2011-20, the authors estimate that total human emissions of all greenhouse gases have reached 60bn tonnes per year. Of this, CDR efforts currently remove around 3bn every year, they find. The study calculates global emissions in CO2 equivalent (CO2e).
The plot below shows current global greenhouse gas emissions and removals. The bar on the left shows emissions of CO2 (blue) and non-CO2 (pink) gases, as well as land emissions (brown). CO2 removal is shown in yellow.
The bars on the right show that 99.9% of CDR comes from conventional CDR on land (dark yellow), while “novel” CDR (light yellow) has a negligible contribution.
In 2015, countries agreed under the Paris Agreement to keep warming “well below 2C” above pre-industrial temperatures, with an aspiration of limiting warming to 1.5C.
Rapid cuts in emissions are crucial to meet this goal. To make progress, countries are required to submit – and regularly update – their plans for reducing emissions. There is currently a sizeable “emissions gap” between the cuts included in these national proposals and those needed to limit warming to 1.5C.
In many future scenarios that meet the Paris limit, CDR features heavily. For example, in scenarios where global temperatures initially “overshoot” 1.5C, before falling below the limit by 2100, large-scale CDR would be used to remove carbon from the atmosphere and allow global temperatures to decline.
In its most recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) modelled 541 pathways that hold warming to 1.5C or 2C. All of these pathways involve CDR implementation between 2020 and 2100, ranging from a total of 450bn to 1.1tn tonnes of CO2, in addition to deep emissions cuts.
However, there are currently no rules requiring governments to clearly report their CDR plans.
To assess the amount of CDR proposed by governments, the authors therefore had to analyse a range of documents submitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), such as countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and their long-term low-emissions development strategies.
The authors find that if countries implement their national targets, CDR could expand by 1.5-1.9bn tonnes of CO2 per year, compared to levels in 2020. The paper notes that many countries plan to expand land-based removals, but none has yet committed to “substantively scaling” novel CDR methods.
Warming threshold
To assess how much CDR is needed to meet the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement, the authors use Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). These models look at the energy technologies, energy use choices, land-use changes and societal trends that cause, or prevent, greenhouse gas emissions.
The authors select a range of IAM scenarios from the latest IPCC scenario database for its sixth assessment report (AR6). Scenarios that limit warming to 2C require emissions to fall by 46-75% between 2020 and 2050, but CDR becomes the “main mitigation strategy” in the second half of the century, the study says.
The authors add that in these scenarios, conventional CDR on land “starts from a high baseline, but quickly reaches saturation by the mid-century due to land area constraints for afforestation/restoration”. Meanwhile, novel CDR scales up throughout the 21st century and accounts for more than half of cumulative emissions by the year 2100.
To assess the pathways in more detail, the authors select three scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels
In the “demand reduction” scenario, humanity focuses on efficiency and sufficiency measures. This scenario requires an increase in land-based CDR, but no increase in “novel” CDR methods.
The “renewables” scenario sees a supply-side transformation towards renewable energy. This scenario mainly requires land-based CDR, but also includes a small contribution from novel methods.
The “carbon removal” scenario involves a rapid near-term reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but fossil fuels are never entirely phased out, leading to higher “residual emissions” at net-zero CO2. Near-equal levels of land-based and novel CDR are needed by 2050, meaning that novel CDR needs to scale up more than a thousand times from its current capacity.
The plot below shows annual CDR under these three scenarios. The blue line indicates current CDR and each yellow line shows a different scenario. A lower (more negative) number means more CDR.
The study shows that current government plans – which would result in an extra 1.5-1.9bn tonnes of CDR per year by 2050 – are not ambitious enough to comply with any of the three 1.5C scenarios.
The table below shows the changes in different types of CDR required under the different scenarios by 2050, compared to 2020 levels. The column on the right shows the “CDR gap” between current plans and each scenario in 2050.
| Scenario | Total additional CDR (bn tonnes CO2/year) | Additional land-based CDR (bn tonnes CO2/year) | Additional novel CDR (bn tonnes CO2/year) | CDR gap (bn tonnes CO2/year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Demand reduction | 2.3 | 2.3 | 0 | 0.4 |
| Renewables | 5.1 | 4.1 | 0.91 | 3.2 |
| Carbon removal | 7.4 | 4.0 | 3.5 | 5.5 |
The analysis shows that countries “lack progress in this domain of mitigation”, the study says. However, the size of the shortfall depends heavily on the scenario.
Under the demand reduction scenario, the CDR gap in 2050 is only 0.4bn tonnes of CDR per year, but this grows more than tenfold to 5.5bn tonnes of CDR per year under the carbon removal scenario.
Mind the gap
The prospect of relying on large-scale CDR to meet global climate goals is one that prompts concern in many experts.
One fear is that the promise of being able to use CDR in the future might dilute incentives to cut fossil fuel use today, a phenomenon known as “mitigation deterrence”.
Dr William Lamb – a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change and lead author on the study – tells Carbon Brief that the paper acknowledges this concern and tries to be clear that CDR is not a replacement for mitigation.
Prof Steve Pye is a professor at University College London’s Energy Institute, who was not involved in the study. He says that framing the lack of CDR as a “gap” is an “interesting idea”, but does not necessarily reflect a “definitive need for action” in the same way as the emissions gap:
“The implications of the CDR gap are much more open to debate as CDR is a category of mitigation action, with the size of the gap either a cause for alarm or not depending on one’s view of what role that option will or should play.”
He adds that the analysis could even be “interpreted as positive”, because it shows that countries are not being distracted by novel CDR.
Alexandra Deprez – a research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, who is not involved in the study – tells Carbon Brief that the new study does not do enough to consider the “sustainability limits” of CDR.
She recently co-wrote a Carbon Brief guest post explaining these limits, which said:
“The large-scale deployment of land-based CDR could come with major challenges. These include significant ecological and societal risks – particularly to biodiversity loss, food security, freshwater use and human rights, among others – which have not been comprehensively assessed.”
Deprez and Lamb have “opposite starting points” in their work on CDR and therefore arrive at different conclusions, she explains.
Lamb starts by asking “how much CDR is needed” and concludes that it needs to be scaled up, she says. Meanwhile, she tells Carbon Brief that her own work starts by asking “how much CDR can be sustainably deployed” and finds that “‘Paris compatible’ scenarios overstep high CDR sustainability risk”.
Lamb says the authors were “very careful” in selecting the three focus scenarios for the study. He adds:
“We have a kind of selection criteria that includes thinking about the sustainability constraints, whether they’re using too much biomass, whether they’re scaling up novel methods too quickly. And so we’re quite conservative about the specific scenarios we choose.”
Meanwhile Prof Joeri Roglej – director of research at the Grantham Institute – tells Carbon Brief that the study “puts pathways that aim to keep warming as close to 1.5C as possible in the same basket as pathways that keep it below 2C only, therewith suggesting a lower overall ambition than the Paris Agreement”.
He adds:
“The study doesn’t distinguish scenarios with CDR levels that risk undermining sustainability. These presentation choices therefore perpetuate some of the reasons why CDR research is often criticised, including that CDR scholarship often turns a blind eye to the sustainability risks of large-scale CDR deployment.”
Pye adds a note of caution about using IAMs, saying they have “relied heavily on CDR to meet high ambition targets” without accounting for the “political reality” faced by many governments.
CDR reporting
According to the study, only about 40 countries, including the EU, have outlined scenarios in their long-term strategies that depict quantifiable levels of CDR by 2050.
For the other countries – which account for 62% of current conventional CDR on land – the authors assume that overall CDR levels will remain constant.
Lamb tells Carbon Brief that this is a “big assumption”. He notes that while CDR globally has been “quite stable over the past 20 years”, there is a lot of variation between countries. For example, he says that China has been “rapidly increasing” its CDR through large afforestation projects, while many countries in Europe have seen a decrease due to problems in their forestry sector.
The study also assumes that countries without quantifiable scenarios do not currently plan to implement novel CDR methods. “This includes China, Norway and Saudi Arabia, which are all developing technology roadmaps towards novel CDR and could contribute to closing the gap,” the paper says.
Dr Ajay Gambhir is a visiting senior research fellow at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, and was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief that many land-based carbon sinks, such as forests, have the potential to transition to sources of carbon over the coming years.
He adds:
“The authors are mindful of potential reversibility of forest carbon, but this highlights the risks that we are even further from our CDR, and emissions reduction, needs than might be indicated in this analysis.”
The lack of clear data shows that “we need more clarity” in CDR reporting, Lamb tells Carbon Brief. He argues that increasing transparency would “allow more critical reflection actually on carbon dioxide removal plans and whether they’re ambitious enough – or even too ambitious at the expense of emissions reductions”.
The analysis from this paper will be included in the next State of CDR report, which will be released this summer.
The post CO2 removal ‘gap’ shows countries ‘lack progress’ for 1.5C warming limit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
CO2 removal ‘gap’ shows countries ‘lack progress’ for 1.5C warming limit
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies will need to be deployed at rates even faster than those seen for solar power, if the world is to have a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C by 2100, says a new report.
Nearly all pathways to meeting the Paris Agreement’s highest ambition of keeping global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in 2100 involve CDR techniques – ranging from tree-planting to sucking CO2 from air with machines.
This is in addition to steep and immediate emissions cuts.
Scientists expect carbon emissions to push warming beyond 1.5C in the decade ahead, meaning that the target can only be achieved “from above” via large-scale CDR that brings down global temperatures.
These temperature trajectories are known as “overshoot” pathways.
The third “state of CDR” report, written by more than 50 scientists, says that countries’ current CDR plans would fall short of what is needed to limit warming to 1.5C by more than 5bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) per year by 2050.
Global CDR would have to increase fourfold – from 2.2GtCO2 in 2026 to 8.75GtCO2 by 2050 – to have a chance of meeting the 1.5C target by 2100, according to the report.
It adds that deploying CDR can be a “gradual process”, making the period 2026-30 “crucial” for “establishing CDR’s role in limiting climate damages” in the future.
Below, Carbon Brief covers the key findings of the third state of CDR report. (This follows from Carbon Brief’s coverage of the first report in 2023 and second report in 2024.)
- What is CDR?
- What are current levels of CDR?
- How much CDR is needed to reach net-zero goals?
- What does the science say about the potential and costs of CDR?
- What have governments pledged on CDR?
- What is the current funding and research landscape for CDR?
- How is policy impacting CDR demand?
What is CDR?
According to the report, the definition of CDR is:
“Human activities capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it durably in geological, terrestrial or ocean reservoirs, or in products. This includes human enhancement of natural removal processes but excludes natural uptake not directly caused by anthropogenic [human-caused] activities.”
In addition to this, the report includes “three key principles” for CDR, which are:
- The captured CO2 must come from the atmosphere, not from “fossil sources”.
- The subsequent storage “must be durable”, so that the CO2 is not soon reintroduced to the atmosphere.
- The removal must result from human intervention that is in addition to Earth’s natural processes.
In this report, a CDR method is considered durable if it is able to lock up carbon for “decades or more”.
The report classifies CDR techniques as either “conventional” or “novel”.
“Convential” CDR techniques are “well established, already deployed at scale and widely reported by countries as part of [land-use] activities”.
The methods included in this group are tree-planting, ecosystem restoration, agroforestry (trees in agriculture), improving soil carbon in croplands and natural lands, and durable wood production.
“Novel” CDR techniques have “lower level of readiness for deployment and, as a consequence, are currently deployed at smaller scales”, says the report.
Some examples of different CDR methods are listed on the graphic below.
The graphic also shows whether carbon is captured through biological or chemical processes, as well as how “ready” the method is and for how long it can store carbon, among other features.
The report says that CDR is “needed alongside deep and rapid emissions reductions” to give Earth a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C. It continues:
“It should play a smaller role than emissions reductions given uncertainty around the feasible levels of scaling, sustainability limits, storage availability and the risk of reversal, among other constraints.
“In general, CDR should be seen as a limited resource that will need to be used prudently.”
It adds that CDR can “fulfil three major functions”.
In the near term, CDR can help reduce “net emissions”, it says.
In the medium term, CDR can “counterbalance residual emissions” to achieve net-zero CO2 or net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, the report continues.
(“Residual emissions” are those that cannot be eradicated through technologies or societal changes, such as methane emissions from rice production.)
Research suggests that global warming is likely to stop, more or less, once net-zero is achieved globally.
In the long term, CDR can “help achieve net-negative emissions”, a state where CO2 removal exceeds emissions, says the report.
In this state, humans could lower global temperatures. This may allow the world to limit global warming to 1.5C by 2100, even if the temperature target is surpassed earlier on in the century.
Future trajectories where temperatures exceed the 1.5C limit before being brought back down again through CDR techniques are known as “overshoot” pathways.
What are current levels of CDR?
The report says that, at present, “99.9%” of existing CDR is conventional, land-based techniques such as tree-planting and ecosystem restoration.
The world currently removes 2.2GtCO2 per year, equivalent to around 5% of gross global CO2 emissions, it continues.
The largest contributors to removing CO2 from the atmosphere are China, the US, the EU, Brazil and Russia.
The chart below shows the amount of CO2 removed each year over 2014-23 by the largest contributors, through tree-planting (afforestation) and forest restoration (reforestation).
“Novel” CDR, such as biochar and direct air capture, currently removes just 2m tonnes of CO2 annually at present, according to the report.
However, these methods have been growing at a rate of 40% per year – “similar to successful technologies like solar energy, but insufficient for the scale-up required to meet the Paris temperature goal”, says the report.
The graphic below illustrates how the contribution of conventional CDR currently dwarfs novel CDR, but how the latter techniques are quickly growing.
The report says that investment in CDR companies recovered in 2025 following a dip – and its “share of all climate-tech funding” grew to 2.6%.
The report also notes that, at present, most CDR efforts are unevenly distributed across the world.
For example, two-thirds of conventional CDR in voluntary carbon markets is in Latin America, according to the report. (Voluntary carbon markets are where companies can buy credits for carbon-reducing or removing projects, such as tree-planting, to claim that they have “offset” some of their own emissions.)
In addition, most pilot projects that aim to demonstrate novel CDR methods are located in only a few countries, such as Sweden, Denmark and the US, says the report.
The chart below shows the location and timeline of demonstration projects that have been announced, are under construction or in operation globally.
The report continues:
“While first-movers play important roles, if their actions do not diffuse more widely, vulnerability emerges, as evidenced by the impact of US climate policy dismantling.”
(For more, see: How is policy impacting CDR demand?)
How much CDR is needed to reach net-zero goals?
The report examines three scenarios where global temperature rise is limited to “well below” 2C by 2100:
- A current ambition scenario, based on national climate pledges (but omitting the US);
- A highest-possible ambition scenario;
- A delayed ambition scenario, which is consistent with current targets until 2035 and then switches to the highest ambition scenario.
The pledges considered in the report are “nationally determined contributions”, or NDCs, which countries submit periodically to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). NDCs lay out a country’s climate ambition.
Under the current ambition scenario, the report projects a total of 5.9GtCO2 of CDR by 2050 and 12GtCO2 by 2100.
This scenario would result in end-of-century warming of 1.7-2.7C. Importantly, the report says, this scenario does not result in the world reaching net-zero CO2 levels, “meaning that global temperatures would continue to rise, albeit at a much more gradual pace, beyond 2100”.
Under the highest-possible ambition scenario, CDR scales up to 8.8GtCO2 by mid-century and 15.3GtCO2 by the end of the century.
This scenario assumes “full buy-in by all nations”, with economics, scale-up and sustainability providing the main constraints on CDR deployment, the report says.
The highest ambition scenario results in global temperatures peaking at 1.7-1.8C around 2050 and the world achieving net-zero emissions around that time.
Under the delayed ambition scenario, CDR would scale up to 7GtCO2 by 2050 and 23.6GtCO2 by 2100. This scenario shows global temperatures peaking between 1.7C and 2.0C.
This scenario requires larger CDR deployment in the long term than the highest-ambition scenario does, due to the larger cumulative emissions caused by delaying deep emissions reductions.
In both the high ambition and delayed ambition scenarios, the world reaches “deeply net-negative CO2 emissions” by 2100, the report says. This continued deployment of CDR will further draw CO2 from the atmosphere, lowering global temperatures back down to 1.5C.
The chart below shows annual global greenhouse gas emissions through the end of the century under current ambition (red), highest ambition (green) and delayed ambition (blue) scenarios.
While global CDR capacity scales up more slowly in the first and third scenarios, the report notes that, in all three cases, “novel CDR reaches gigatonne-scale deployment by 2050”.
What does the science say about the potential and costs of CDR?
There is a wide range of both carbon-removal potential and associated costs between different methods of CDR, according to the report.
However, it also notes that these numbers “range widely” in the scientific literature.
The discrepancies in estimates of carbon-removal potential are due to a number of factors, the report says, including a lack of available scientific data, inconsistencies in the assumptions made in assessing technical feasibility and a lack of agreement on what, exactly, “potential” means.
These elements also influence the cost of different CDR methods, but additional factors – such as deployment costs in different areas, technological approaches and scope – also play a role in establishing price differences. Because of this, the report says, “cost estimates are often difficult to compare across methods, complicating design and policy decisions”.
The chart below shows the reported range of mitigation potential (left) and reported range of costs (right) for different CDR methods. The top four rows indicate conventional CDR methods, while bottom 11 rows show novel CDR methods. The chart refers to “mitigation potential”, rather than removal potential, because some estimates do not distinguish between removals and avoided emissions.
(Avoided emissions refers to the difference in emissions from carrying out a project, compared to a hypothetical alternative – such as the reduced emissions from halting deforestation.)
The darker colours indicate estimates that are more constrained, meaning that they are either based on stricter assumptions or there is more agreement between different estimates.
The report notes that for most removal methods, the low end of the potential is around 1GtCO2 per year, while the upper limit of costs is more than $200/tCO2.
The least expensive CDR approaches are forestry-based methods, soil-carbon sequestration and biomass burial. For forestry-based methods, the report puts the cost of CDR at $5-$53 per tonne of CO2 removed. Soil-carbon sequestration costs reach as high as $150 per tonne of CO2 removed, but could have negative overall costs “when accounting for crop yield increases potentially resulting” from changed farm-management practices, the report says.
However, it adds that “these CDR methods are typically associated with lower levels of permanence” than other methods.
Other relatively low-cost methods include coastal wetland restoration, biochar, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and enhanced rock weathering, while ocean alkalinity enhancement is a medium-cost option.
The most expensive methods include direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) and direct ocean carbon capture and storage (DOCCS).
The report also notes that a total estimate of CDR removals cannot be obtained by adding up the removal potential of all of the separate methods, since different methods can compete for scarce resources. For example, BECCS, biochar, biomass burial and biomass sinking all rely on the same base input – biomass – and therefore cannot all be maximised at the same time.
What have governments pledged on CDR?
While many countries include some amount of CDR in their national climate plans, there is currently a large gap between the amount of CDR pledged in these plans and the amount that will be needed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C by the end of the century, says the report.
This quantity is referred to as the “CDR gap” – the difference between what is pledged and what is needed.
The size of the CDR gap is dependent not just on the pledges made by countries, but also the choice of the “benchmark” scenario against which the pledges are measured. Lower – or delayed – emissions reductions lead to larger shortfalls in the long term, meaning “CDR must subsequently be scaled to very high levels”, says the report.
Current NDCs and other country submissions to the UNFCCC total 2.5GtCO2 per year of removals in 2030, 2.7GtCO2 per year in 2035 and 3.6GtCO2 per year in 2050.
This gives a CDR gap of 0.3GtCO2 in 2030, 1.2GtCO2 in 2035 and 5.2GtCO2 in 2050, according to the report. These figures are obtained using assumed “immediate, ambitious action at all levels to reduce emissions” and the most-ambitious estimates of CDR set out in national pledges. Together, this provides a “lower bound” for the CDR gap, says the report.
By comparison, a 10-year delay in implementing ambitious emissions reductions will result in the need to remove at least an additional 150GtCO2 from the atmosphere, compared to the most ambitious scenario. (See: How much CDR is needed to reach net-zero goals?)
The report says that the CDR gap has widened since the second state of CDR report was released in 2024, due to the US leaving the Paris Agreement. It adds that other countries have “not delivered a step change in ambition” in their latest round of climate pledges.
It also cautions that “credibility issues with national pledges may mean that the CDR gap is actually larger than what we assess here”.
The report notes that current CDR pledges by companies are “substantially higher than country pledges”, at 5GtCO2 per year in 2050. However, it adds, “credibility in these announcements is low”.
What is the current funding and research landscape for CDR?
Funding of CDR research and development – as well as investment in CDR companies – has continued to increase in recent years.
In total, there has been around $5.6bn in grant funding distributed to CDR research since 2005, according to the report’s analysis. Roughly one-third of this has come in the past three years.
Funding for CDR research grants grew 13% each year between 2022 and 2025, the report says, and the corresponding number of research publications grew at a similar rate.
Funding was largely targeted at a handful of key areas, notably soil carbon sequestration, biochar and forest-based CDR.
DACCS and BECCS only make up a small number of active grants, but together account for around two-fifths of all funding due to “substantially larger” project sizes.
Despite the growth of research grants and scientific publications, the report concludes that early-stage innovation in CDR is “uneven” and says there is “no strong evidence of a step-change”.
It notes that much of the support for CDR has come from projects with a broader focus, rather than those that focus specifically on CDR.
The authors also point to a decline in “inventive activity”, as measured by patenting of CDR-related innovations. While patenting for emissions-cutting technologies in general has been on an upward trajectory, CDR patenting peaked in 2011.
Meanwhile, the report highlights the “remarkable” sustained investment in CDR companies, against a backdrop of falling investment in climate-related technologies. It notes that CDR now accounts for around 3% of overall “climate-tech funding”.
Yet, again, it says future developments remain “uncertain”. Since the previous 2024 “state of CDR” report, companies have scaled back their ambitions and policy reversals – notably in the US – “underscore that funding uncertainty remains a key barrier”. (See: How is policy impacting CDR demand?)
An upward tick in funding in 2025 was driven primarily by a “surge” in grants from predominantly public institutions, as well as $0.5bn in debt financing for a single BECCS project in Sweden.
Reliance on such funding sources “highlight[s] the volatility of the CDR innovation ecosystem”, according to the report.
The report also has a chapter focusing on the voluntary carbon market, which it describes as “propelling most of the current demand for novel CDR”.
The scale of this market remains fairly small, with contracts for 0.04GtCO2 of removals signed last year.
Moreover, the concentration of sales within a small number of buyers – particularly Microsoft – remains a “critical vulnerability”, the authors note.
How is policy impacting CDR demand?
The report analyses CDR policies in G20 nations – which together account for three-quarters of global emissions – to assess how they are acting to support CDR across their economies.
In total, 140 countries have announced net-zero targets, including virtually all of the world’s major emitters. In doing so, the report points out that the governments of these nations have “implicitly included a role for CDR in their climate plans”.
However, this does not always translate into measures specifically designed to scale up CDR.
Only the EU has adopted a binding, quantified removals target into law – namely, the goal to reach 310m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e) of annual net removals in the land sector by 2030.
Overall, conventional CDR is the main focus of policy, with various governments focusing on tree planting to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.
Among G20 nations, only the UK and Australia have set specific goals to scale up novel CDR, such as BECCS and DACCS, over the coming decade.
The report highlights some nations, including Canada, Germany, Switzerland and the UK, as taking proactive steps to incentivise CDR.
The authors point to national strategies, financial support for CDR and efforts to integrate it into emissions trading systems (ETS) as examples of effective policy making.
(The report also stresses that the US, which was previously a “leader” on CDR, has now “frozen or dismantled funding and support” for CDR under the Trump administration.)
Most of the successful policies highlighted in the report focus on supporting the supply of CDR, with “less attention so far on creating demand”.
This is significant because CDR “generally lacks a natural market”, meaning there are not automatically buyers willing to spend money on emissions removals. Therefore, the authors say, policy interventions are important to create markets and boost demand.
“Compliance” carbon credits – referring to credits that can be used to meet legally mandated emissions targets – provide a way to support demand, according to the report authors.
Only some ETSs, such as those used in New Zealand and Australia, allow the use of credits based on forest-related removals for compliance. (It is worth noting that such credits are controversial, as removals by forests are not always permanent.)
The report also highlights the need for “foundational policies to create a governance framework for CDR, including rules for quantification of removal, guidelines for community engagement and the minimisation of negative environmental impacts”.
The post Q&A: The current state of ‘carbon dioxide removal’ around the world appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: The current state of ‘carbon dioxide removal’ around the world
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Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
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Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
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Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
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Renewable Energy7 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
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Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
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Greenhouse Gases11 months ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测